That Crichton’s magnum opus involved dinosaurs – my other great childhood obsession – seemed to dictate that my own should, too. So, with notoriety foremost on my mind, I decided that I was going to write a novel. A boy genius doesn’t gain notoriety by meeting expectations, only by exceeding them in some impossible way.
Throughout my vacation, as inside my aunt’s house the rituals of Christmas proceeded – turkeys roasted, gifts wrapped – I sat outside in our rented mini-van, listening to a cassette tape of John Williams’s score for Jurassic Park and reading, from cover to cover, every book that Michael Crichton had ever written.Īt school, that year, I began handing in short-story assignments with elaborate cover pages based on the Crichton paperbacks I’d gorged on in Texas perfect reproductions of those gaudy airport-novel covers with massive block letters spelling out my surname and the story’s title, almost an afterthought, nestled somewhere below. The following Christmas, traveling with my family to Houston, Texas, I spent the entirety of my holiday allowance at the airport newsstand, buying up every single Crichton paperback they had in stock (which, if you were in an airport bookstore anytime in the mid-90s, was all of them). I saw the film five times in theaters, and immediately bought a copy of the book, which I adored and obsessed over like nothing else I’d ever read.
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I devoured Sphere, but my obsession with Crichton wouldn’t fully bloom until two years later, when the movie adaptation of his novel Jurassic Park exploded into my cultural consciousness with an onslaught of television ads and McDonald’s promotional tie-ins.
It made sense, then, that as other twelve year-olds practiced stickhandling like Jaromir Jagr and memorizing the lyrics to Nirvana’s Nevermind, I instead spent my evenings in front of the computer attempting to write a best-selling sci-fi adventure novel.
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I didn’t know it while I was flaunting his books throughout my elementary school, but forty years earlier Crichton had lived out my dreams of childhood achievement.Īs a pre-teen he wrote travel articles for the New York Times in his early twenties, while attending Harvard Medical School, he published a series of spy novels under the pseudonyms John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. Yet he had managed to produce, in that short time, an enormous – and enormously diverse – body of work. He was only 66, which seemed far too young. At the time, news of his death was met with little of the laudatory eulogizing you might expect for someone who had such a broad influence on popular culture (at one point in the mid-90s he was responsible, concurrently, for the number one book, movie, and television series in the country). Six years ago today, Michael Crichton passed away. When she tried to correct my pronunciation, I laughed, and in the haughty, dismissive tone my possession of the book was an attempt to justify, told her: “Um, I don’t think so.” I told her it was a novel called Sphere, by Michael Crick-ton. I paraded through the hallways at school, holding the book face-out, until finally a classmate asked me about it. In the sixth grade I picked out a paperback from the school library for no other reason than it appeared difficult to read and would, I imagined, suggest to teachers and classmates a secret literary acumen. As a child, I thought of myself as a prodigy.
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